About Uta Frith

Beginning with her doctoral work in the Sixties, Uta Frith has contributed to the transformation of developmental psychology into developmental cognitive neuroscience. She did this by applying paradigms from information processing theory and neuropsychology to the study of typical and atypical development in the case of autism and dyslexia. She proposed that deficits in critical cognitive mechanisms early in life result in the specific signs and symptoms in both these neurodevelopmental disorders.

In the case of autism, Uta contributed to two major cognitive theories. In the early 1980s, together with her colleagues Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen, she pioneered the idea of a circumscribed cognitive deficit in the ability to attribute mental states to self and others (mentalising) in autism. The 'mindblindness' theory has guided the successful search for the neural basis of mentalising and its failures. Uta Frith also proposed the theory of 'Weak central coherence' to explain superior perceptual and memory abilities in autism. This theory refers to a detail-focussed processing style, which is proposed to flourish at the expense of the drive for overall meaning. This idea, which was pursued mainly by Francesca Happé, and more recently, Sarah White, has directed attention to the cognitive strengths in autism and in particular to savant skills.

In the case of dyslexia, Uta Frith switched from a primarily visual theory to a phonological theory in the late 1970s. First with Maggie Snowling, and later with Franck Ramus, she has investigated the cognitive phenotype that is defined by persistent difficulties in accessing internally represented forms of words. In a cross-cultural European project with Eraldo Paulesu and Jean-Francois Demonet she showed that the brain basis of dyslexia in Italian, French and English is the same, while the manifestation of dyslexia in reading and spelling performance differs in the three countries.